I read with dismay the news that Robin Williams has died of apparent suicide at the age of 63. This saddens me immensely, as he has long been one of my favorite performers. I still have fond memories of watching Mork & Mindy as a child (and the cultural phenomenon it spawned), and later laughing uncontrollably at his manic stand-up improvs. The man was a comic genius, a fire hydrant of hilarity. It’s impossible to watch one of his comedy specials and not be amazed at how agile his mind was, how playful and irreverent he could be, a whirling dervish of human creativity.

But for me, it was his unexpected turn as a dramatic actor that cemented his place as one of the all-time greats. From Good Morning, Vietnam to The Fisher King, from Good Will Hunting to Awakenings, Robin Williams has displayed a surprising depth and sensitivity that few observers of his early career would have ever guessed. After all, this is the same man who got famous saying “nanu-nanu” and “shazbot!” That he would go on to give some of the most inspired and touching performances I’ve ever seen will go down as one of the greatest career reinventions I’ve ever witnessed.

Dead Poets Society, in particular, has always held a special place in my heart. Long after watching it for the first time as a high school student, it has continued to have a lasting impact on my life. I make a point to watch it again at least once a year (in fact, I’m watching it right now). How can anyone view this film and not feel inspired? To be reminded that you don’t have to live a life of quiet desperation, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.

Didn’t we all wish we had a Professor Keating in our young lives? A teacher who pushed you to be more, to dream more, to suck out all the marrow of life? Professor Keating (as so brilliantly portrayed by Williams) embodied all these things for me, an inspirational combination of humor and wisdom, of hope and possibility.

But there’s also a dark side to that film, an undercurrent of sadness that culminates with the suicide of one of Keating’s students. I suppose what I took most from that scene is that we must strive to fight on, to persevere, to gather ye rosebuds while we may.

Perhaps that is what I find most distressing about the news of Williams’ death today: that he gave up the good fight and surrendered to the darkness that so clearly haunted him. I don’t fault him or begrudge him for this; I’m just terribly saddened.

Rest in peace, Mr. Williams. May you find some comfort in knowing you did contribute a verse.

By now you’ve probably heard of Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s new subscription service that’s being dubbed “Netflix for books.” Subscribers pay a monthly fee of $9.99 to gain unlimited access to an electronic library of 600,000 ebooks. There’s a 30-day free trial, so I decided to check it out.

The first thing I noticed is there are some bonafide blockbusters available: Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Life of Pi. These well-known titles are splashed across the front page of the website, but once you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that the bulk of the library appears to consist of independently published novels. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but subscribers expecting to find all the latest hits from their favorite big name authors will be disappointed.

I often hear the same complaint about Netflix. Some new customers will go in expecting to find specific movies, as if they were visiting a video store (remember those?). They’re soon disappointed when they discover The Dark Knight, for example, is unavailable for streaming, and quickly cancel their service. Those same sorts of subscribers would likely be disappointed with Kindle Unlimited. 600,000 books is a lot of books, but it’s nowhere near all the books.

But despite all its nay-sayers, Netflix has thrived. Why is this? I believe it’s a combination of Netflix’s low monthly fee combined with subscribers’ willingness to just see what’s on.

Allow me to explain: I find it’s best to use Netflix as if you’re surfing channels on TV: Let’s just see what’s on. They have a ton of content that appeals to me, and as long as I don’t go in with preconceived notions of what I want to watch, I can always find something. Truth be told, it’s more content than I have time to watch, especially if you consider all the television series they’ve added. And if I still want to watch something specific, there are DVDs, Blu-rays, and other pay-per-view services to provide exactly that.

As a reader, I think Kindle Unlimited should be approached the same way. It’s unlikely to have the latest hit book you’ve been dying to read (you know, the one you wanted to read before the movie came out), but there is still a ton of content to catch your interest.

After initiating my 30-day trial, I immediately loaded up my tablet with a slew of novels I never got around to reading (starting with Wonder Boys), as well as some highly-rated indie series I’ve been meaning to check out. Will I be able to read enough books per month to make it worth my $10 per month? Probably.

I think Kindle Unlimited will be a great service for readers, and I’m sure over time the selection will grow. But the question remains: Is Kindle Unlimited good for authors? Let’s examine this point-by-point:

If subscribers can read an unlimited amount of books for $10/month, who will continue to buy ebooks?

Relax. I think the limited selection will ensure that ebook sales will be just fine. Readers looking for specific ebooks will continue to buy them just as they did before, perhaps using Kindle Unlimited as a supplement to their reading habits. After all, a lot of the same fears were directed towards Netflix when it first came out, and it hasn’t exactly killed the rest of the video market. There’s Redbox, Vudu, Amazon, Best Buy, and don’t forget movie theaters… It seems people can’t get enough movies!

So, no, Kindle Unlimited won’t destroy the book business any more than Netflix destroyed the movie business. Besides, much like their movie publisher counterparts, traditional book publishers are likely to withhold much of their content from Kindle Unlimited, or make it available only for a limited time, to “protect” their existing sales.

Will Kindle Unlimited result in authors earning less money?

This is a tough one. Obviously if existing books sales are unaffected, then authors who don’t participate in the program should also be unaffected. The fear, of course, is that Kindle Unlimited will take away sales from these authors, that subscribers will eschew purchasing individual books and just enjoy what’s available for their $10 per month. I suspect this won’t be the case, but time will tell. If anything, I would expect this program to increase overall readership, and not just take a precious slice of an ever-shrinking pie.

But what about authors who participate in the program, or are considering participating? Will Kindle Unlimited boost their income?

I’d say it depends. That’s not much of an answer, I admit, but hear me out. Kindle Unlimited will pay authors a share of the KDP Select fund every month. This is the same fund that pays authors when readers borrow a book through the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library (KOLL). Amazon has just added $800,00o to this monthly fund for July, bringing the total to $2 million to divvy up between authors.

What does this amount to in individual royalties? It’s hard to say. There’s a fixed pool to split, but no one knows how many books will be sold under this new program, including Amazon. I’ve seen estimates from as low as 13¢ per sale to as high as $2. If the Kindle Unlimited program becomes wildly successful and the $2 million fund should prove insufficient to pay authors a meaningful royalty, I believe Amazon will increase the fund. That’s just good business, for both the authors and Amazon. After all, if the royalty is too low, authors will pull their books from the program, and Amazon will lose subscribers. In a few months we should have more data, but for now, let’s use the KOLL program as a target rate, which earns the author approximately $2 every time a book is borrowed.

But wait! There’s an additional caveat: Unlike the KOLL program, Kindle Unlimited requires the reader to read at least 10% of the book before the author will be paid.

What? A reader has to read my book before I get paid?

Well, yes. At least 10% of it, anyway. If you think about it, it makes sense. Unlimited subscribers have the ability to download an unlimited (imagine that!) number of books per month. I’m sure some of these subscribers will immediately download hundreds of books, if not more, though they’re unlikely to ever get around to reading them all. Obviously, Amazon wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for all these unread downloads (well, not pay very much anyway), so this restriction seems reasonable. Amazon is only paying for the books that readers actually read (or at least start to read), and the books will become unavailable if the subscription lapses. My takeaway from this policy? Make sure the first 10% of your book is damn good!

Okay, so now we’ve established how Kindle Unlimited authors will be paid, and roughly how much they will be paid, does it make sense to participate?

First of all, if you’re not self-published, you probably won’t have a say in the matter; your publisher will decide if your books are made available to the program (not likely).

For the rest of us, it’s the classic price versus volume argument: Is the risk of a potentially lower royalty outweighed by a potentially greater number of sales? If you’re an independent author selling your ebooks at $10 a pop and you’re doing great business, then the program probably doesn’t make good sense (or cents). After all, you’d be trading a $7 royalty for a $2 royalty, requiring you to sell 3.5X as many books to make up the difference. That’s a pretty tall order. But if you’re already selling your books for $2.99, for instance, you’re making about $2 per sale anyway, so the greater exposure the Kindle Unlimited program provides could well be worth it.

But like the KOLL program, there’s a catch. In order to participate in Kindle Unlimited, you need to enroll your ebook in Kindle Select, which means it will be digitally exclusive to Amazon. (Obviously Amazon has made exceptions to secure the non-exclusive rights for books such as the The Lord of the Rings series, but for the rest of us mortals, it’s Kindle Select or nothing.) Furthermore, as far as I can tell, there’s no way for an author who is enrolled in the Kindle Select program to opt-out of the Unlimited portion of it. As of this writing, if your book is enrolled in Select, it is enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program.

Is this exclusivity worth it?

Tough call. Amazon is the biggest ebook marketplace, but it’s not the only ebook marketplace. Will the exposure of the Unlimited program outweigh the loss of sales and exposure through other outlets such as iBooks or Nook? Unfortunately, it’s impossible to say, but some big names such as Hugh Howey are jumping in on the topic, optimistic that Amazon’s service will be a boon for self-published authors.

Furthermore, it’s not always about the individual sale. Sometimes the exposure can be much more valuable, leading to a larger fan base that will increase sales further down the road, or resulting in sales of other books. If Kindle Unlimited becomes a huge hit, the question may become whether you can afford not tobe in it.

The Bottom Line

Change is always scary, but that’s the nature of progress. Along the way it seems as if someone is always predicting an apocalypse of one sort or another, whether it be in the financial markets or book publishing. Rather than listening to such pundits, I would encourage self-published authors to embrace new technologies and new avenues to sell their books with optimism. We have an advantage in that we can adapt quickly to change, unlike traditional publishers, who try to keep the old systems that have benefited them for so long firmly in place. I doubt any of the big publishers will ever embrace Kindle Unlimited, preferring to keep their traditional sales models as well as their accompanying high prices.

To this I say good! The less books in the Kindle Unlimited program, the more visible my own titles will be. And the higher traditional publishing insists on pricing their ebooks, the more attractive my low prices will be. (Seriously, I think it’s in every independent author’s best interest for traditional publishers to resist change for as long as possible; the ability we have to price our books well below theirs is a huge advantage.)

To this end, I have enrolled my first book The Woodlander in the Kindle Select program, and thus it is now available in the Kindle Unlimited program as well. Whether this is a smart move, time will tell, but for now I’m cautiously optimistic.

I’ve written about plotting before, but over the past year my thoughts on the subject have evolved, so I thought I would revisit it.

When I first started writing The Woodlander, I was firmly in the “just wing it” camp. the main reason being I wanted to avoid the dreaded “paralysis-by-analysis” effect, where if I didn’t plan out every last detail ahead of time, I wouldn’t even be able to start writing. Far better, I thought, to just jump in and let the plot come naturally.

Fortunately, the plot did come to me, but that process (or lack thereof) also resulted in some substantial rewrites and edits! There were dead ends that had to be scrapped, new ideas that had to be seamlessly worked back in, themes that needed developing, and so forth.

Because of this, my first book took much longer to complete than I had anticipated. I’m very happy with the end result, but it’s clear that I need to write much faster if I want to put out a steady stream of books. (Not coincidentally, I think the primary key to discoverability is having a large collection of work available, so speed is of the essence.)

Still, there remains the problem of working out the entire plot before you even begin. For instance, as I wrote The Woodlander, I really didn’t know what was going to happen to poor John Grey, and even if I had tried to plot out the details ahead of time, I was worried that it would come out forced and contrived.

So, with this in mind, I’ve taken a hybrid approach to plotting with the sequel Grimm & Grey. It’s split into two story arcs: one involving John Grey and his continued quest from the first book, and the other following Lisa as she begins to attend classes at snooty Langley Prep, all the while learning she can’t hide from her past (read this last part in dramatic movie-announcer voice).

The first arc is very much in the vein of The Woodlander, an epic adventure with over-the-top action. I’ve already completed this arc, and I wrote it much like I did the first book – making it up as I go. Of course, along the way I had some some general idea of what was going to happen, but for the most part I just let it rip. I like writing in this fashion – it’s very liberating, and it gives you an opportunity to surprise yourself!

That’s all good and well, but now I had to write the second arc involving Lisa. This one is interwoven with the first through alternating chapters, so it was clear some planning would be necessary. Passage of time, for instance, needs to be consistent. I can’t have weeks pass by for John Grey in one chapter while mere hours pass for Lisa in the next. The two need to intertwine tightly, and come back together in a satisfying conclusion.

As trite as it might sound, I think the original Star Wars movies are a great model for this. Particularly The Empire Strikes Back, where we follow Luke on his quest to become a Jedi while simultaneously following Han and Leia as they run from the Empire. The two arcs come back together in a satisfying (if tragic) conclusion, with the gang reunited at the end (albeit sans Luke’s hand and Han’s carbonite-encased body).

One of the great advantages of this dual-arc approach is each story can have a different style and feel. Can you imagine an entire movie of just Luke learning to be a Jedi? It would be great for a little while, but how many objects do we need to see him levitate before we get the idea? As a stand-alone concept, it’s not nearly as interesting, but when you simultaneously have Luke’s friends getting captured by Vader, and suddenly Luke has to abandon his training to try and save them… well, now I have to know what happens next!

The challenge is getting these two arcs to come back together seamlessly. To that end, I have begun using Scrivener’s outlining features:

Don’t worry, spoilers redacted!

Scrivener allows you to create a synopsis for each chapter and lay them out as notecards on a virtual cork board. You can then drag the cards around to reorder events as you like. I’m finding this feature extremely useful as I try to integrate Lisa’s story arc around John’s.

As I stated before, John’s half of the book is already complete. For each chapter in this arc, I created a notecard containing a synopsis of that chapter. I then placed blank notecards in between the existing ones to start plotting out Lisa’s own adventure.

The advantage here is I know exactly how many new chapters I need to write, how much time needs to pass in each chapter, and when I need to start wrapping things up to bring everything back together. I have to say, if I was just winging this part of the book, it would probably come out a mess, requiring extensive rewrites to blend it all back in!

So if nothing else, I’m hoping this new plotting process will eliminate a lot of editing, allowing me to get the book out faster. But there has been an additional benefit I hadn’t anticipated:

When you see the plot laid out on notecards, lulls in the story are revealed. Over the last year, I’ve become a firm believer in “always raising the stakes,” so it’s easy to see when a chapter ends without a compelling reason to go to the next. I’m not saying every chapter needs to be a nail-biting cliffhanger, but they should each leave the reader wanting more.

For example, I noticed a few chapters in Grimm & Grey that left me saying, “Well, that’s all very pleasant, but who cares? I just want to know what happens next!” While others are so chock-full of twists and turns that they could easily be broken into multiple chapters. By splitting/combining these, I should be able to make each more compelling in turn.

This is the sort of thing that’s hard to spot without an outline view. As much as it pains me to say it, creating a synopsis of each chapter is looking more and more like the smart thing to do. It really gives you a perspective on your work that’s hard to reproduce when you’re down in the weeds of your own prose.

Now, whether you create that synopsis before you’ve written a single paragraph or after you’ve completed the entire book is up to you. For me, I’m doing a little of both.

One of the great things about blogging is the opportunity you get to interact with lots of wonderful people from around the globe. One such person I’ve had the fortune of meeting is Anthony Lance, a fellow author residing in Sydney, Australia. I started following his I SPIDER blog last year, shortly after creating my own blog. At the time, Lance had just self-published his book I SPIDERon Amazon. Although I was still intent on pursuing a traditional publishing deal back then, the self-publishing process fascinated me, so I decided to check his book out. Here’s my flashback review:

I SPIDER is a darkly fascinating tale of a young man’s descent into murder and madness. As the story unfolds, you really get the sense that the protagonist is losing his grip on reality. It’s all told from a disjointed first-person point of view that captures the character’s sense of confusion and frustration. He soon becomes obsessed with the idea of killing a man, and his choice of weapon is most unique: spider’s venom.

Lance does a fantastic job setting up the story as he describes a spider-infested Australia. It’s a chilling yet believable world, largely due to the detailed anecdotes documenting our “hero’s” various encounters with spiders throughout his life. They’re simply everywhere. But despite the constant danger, he develops an oddly symbiotic relationship with the creepy crawlers, eventually cultivating them to carry out his own nefarious plans.

The story builds to a terrific climax with a surprise twist at the end. It’s exactly the kind of book you aren’t likely to get from a traditional publisher, so check it out!

Over the last year, Lance and I struck up a friendship. When my own book The Woodlander came out, he was kind enough to return me the favor of reading it. Not only did he leave me a flattering review, he then one-upped me in the nice guy department by creating the wonderful image above depicting my character John Grey. I have to say, he really nailed it! That’s pretty darn close to what I pictured in my head as I wrote that scene.

Anyway, the point of all this isn’t to tell you what great guys we are (I think that’s pretty obvious), but to announce a partnership. After reading a recent post on Lance’s blog, I left him a comment suggesting a “what if” scenario. I was halfway joking at the time, but Lance loved the concept (and maybe more importantly, his wife did, too). He asked me if I would be interested in collaborating on a book together.

Do Longhorns moo? (Yes… yes, they do…)

I jumped at the opportunity. Normally, writing is a solitary pursuit, so having the chance to bounce ideas off another author has been great. The proposals have been flying back and forth between the States and Australia as we try to nail down the plot. We’re not quite ready to announce the premise yet, but suffice it to say it will be a thriller with sci-fi elements, all loosely based on historical events. At this point, we’re still very much in the research phase, but every fact we uncover just seems to inspire more great ideas.

One year when I was a kid, my older brother received an electric guitar for Christmas. It was one of those cheap Harmony guitars, the kind you used to find in the back of a Sears catalog. It even came with a matching amplifier that would get all distorted if you turned it up real loud (which we loved, but I’m sure my parents soon regretted that purchase). For a young beginner, it was perfect.

Although it was officially my brother’s guitar (you know how important these distinctions are when you’re a kid), we both shared it. But as the following Christmas approached, I was spending more time playing it than he was, and it was clear that I would soon need a guitar of my own.

Around that same time, I had started taking lessons from a local musician at the corner music store. His name was Chris, and I remember he had curly red hair that ran all the way down his back. And he was always wearing an army jacket for some reason. I think professionally he played bass guitar in multiple bands, but he picked up a few bucks tutoring kids like myself on weeknights.

To Chris’s credit, he never did say anything about the cheap Harmony guitar I lugged to practice every week. Its frets buzzed like a fly caught in a screen window, and it would only stay in tune for about half a song. But when you’re a kid who’s just learning to play, none of that’s important. Honestly, even if I’d had a classic Les Paul Custom, I still would have sucked. It wasn’t the cheap Harmony guitar holding me back.

That being said, there does come a point where inferior equipment will hinder your progress. About a year into my guitar studies, I was approaching that point. Tuesday nights, while waiting in the music shop for my lessons to begin, I would sample the other guitars on display. The first thing I would notice is how much heavier they were. They made my brother’s Harmony feel like a toy, like it was made of balsa wood (it might have been balsa wood, for all I know). Then I would notice the smooth fret action, how much easier it was to form chords–all without that infernal buzzing! Yeah, even at that early age, I knew that Harmony was a pretty bad guitar. And being my brother’s, it wasn’t even my bad guitar!

As the year drew to a close, I knew I was going to ask for a guitar of my own that Christmas. Since I would be stuck with it for a long time, I wanted to make sure it was a good one. But my parents were not wealthy. They could not afford most of the fancy guitars on display in that music shop. So, I turned to my guitar instructor, Chris, for some advice.

“Chris, I’m wanting a new guitar for Christmas. I was hoping you could recommend one to my father.”

“Sure,” Chris said, brushing his stringy red hair from his face, “I could do that. What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I’m not sure. My parents won’t spend a lot of money on a guitar, so it needs to be something cheap.”

“Inexpensive,” Chris corrected me, “not cheap.”

To a little kid, this was a zen-like moment of clarity, as if I’d just been Miyagi’d by my secretly-wise rock-and-roll instructor in the back of the music shop. It sounded very profound, at least to my young ears. Before that moment, I had always used the two words interchangeably. But now, for the first time in my young life, I heard a real distinction between the two.

That Christmas, I received a used Epiphone guitar that Chris had recommended to my father. Epiphone makes quality guitars with the Gibson look, but without the Gibson price. For an intermediate player like myself, it was perfect–leaps and bounds above my brother’s Harmony. In fact, I still have that guitar today. It’s the best Christmas present I ever got. But perhaps the most valuable thing I received that year was not the guitar, but the words of wisdom from my guitar instructor:

“Inexpensive, not cheap.”

The fact that something could be inexpensive without being cheap (like my Epiphone guitar) was a revelation. Quality for a low price. As a consumer, of course, this is the Holy Grail.

Which is all my long-winded way of bringing up the subject of ebook pricing.

Historically, authors haven’t been involved in pricing their books. This was always the publisher’s job, and to give them credit, they did a pretty good job of it. But recent innovations (i.e. the rise of ebooks) have threatened to disrupt legacy publication.

Leading the way has been Amazon, the number one ebook seller. Amazon has been able to dominate the ebook market through technology, efficiency, and perhaps most importantly, low prices. Amazon is willing to take a loss on items like ebooks just to attract customers and keep competitors away. From a publisher’s point of view, this creates a problem: the potential cannibalization of their physical book sales by inexpensive ebooks. Whether this fear is justified or not, they would like to see their ebooks priced higher, despite the reduced costs.

How did this situation come about? Well, you see, publishers had been offering their ebooks to distributors under the same model they sold paper books: the wholesale model. Under this model, the publisher sets a wholesale price. The retailer is then free to sell the book for less than this price, but they would still owe the publisher a cut based on the full wholesale price.

Sounds great for publishers, no? After all, whatever price Amazon sets on a book, the publishers were still guaranteed to receive their full cut. But what they didn’t count on was Amazon’s ruthless ability and determination to lower prices, even to the point of selling at a loss. Consumers, of course, loved this, but publishers were dismayed. They quickly found their ebooks selling for much less than they desired (often $9.99), which disrupted their ability to set higher prices in other stores and threatened the sales of their physical books. Furthermore, Amazon was establishing a near-monopoly on ebooks, which put them in a position to dictate terms to the publishers. By 2009, Amazon’s share of the ebook market was estimated to be 90%. Publishers remembered what happened to the music industry when iTunes became the dominant music store and Apple insisted tracks be sold at 99¢. By the time the music industry realized what was happening, it was too late.

So, perhaps it’s ironic that it was Apple who came around with a new proposal that would severely hamper Amazon’s ability to discount prices, potentially disrupting their dominant position in the market. The publishers leapt at it. Apple and 5 of the 6 major publishers agreed to establish an agency model (Random House declined). This is a sales model where the publisher sets the price of a book, not the distributor. In effect, the publishers established a price floor on their offerings, making it difficult for retailers to undercut this price. The major publishers, eager to maintain their margins and protect their legacy business, quickly jumped on board.

There was just one problem: how is this not considered price fixing? The Department of Justice must have agreed, as they soon filed charges of collusion against Apple and the five major publishers. In the end, the publishers all settled with the DoJ, but Apple went to court–and lost! Now that the agency model for ebooks is dead and buried, Amazon is once again free to set whatever prices they like on ebooks, though their dominant marketshare has been somewhat diminished.

So, why do I still feel most ebooks are too expensive?

My sister recently recommended a new book to me on Goodreads. I clicked on the link and immediately balked at the price: $9.99. I’m not sure why–after all, ten bucks isn’t all that much to pay for the hours of entertainment a book could provide.

Perhaps it’s the rise of self-published books and their lower prices. The last book I purchased was Hugh Howey’s Wool, and it only cost me $1.99. Granted, it was on sale, but even at its normal price of $5.99, am I to believe that Wool is only 60% as good as this other book priced at $9.99?

If not, then how do you explain the price difference? Easy: one is offered by a traditional publisher, and the other is self-published. Now, I understand that traditional publication involves a lot more overhead (like executives, sales people, marketing, warehousing), and they need to set their prices higher in order to maintain profits. But as a consumer, how does any of that benefit me? Quite frankly, it doesn’t.

This is one thing that publishers don’t seem to understand, or maybe they just don’t want to admit it. As a reader, I don’t care who published a particular book. I just care about the contents of the book, and perhaps its author. The intricacies of the publishing business are not my concern.

Ah, you might say, but as an author yourself, you should care about maintaining higher prices. After all, writers need to make a living, too!

Well, I do care, so let’s examine that statement closer. Let’s say the traditionally published author’s ebook has a wholesale price of $16 (I don’t know if that’s accurate, but let’s be generous). That author gets a 15% royalty rate, so for each sale, they earn $2.40. Now, let’s look at the self-published author’s $6 ebook. For each sale on Amazon, they earn 70%, or $4.20. That’s a huge difference in the self-published author’s favor!

As you can see, the traditionally published ebook not only costs consumers more, but the author earns less per sale. So, if it’s not good for consumers, and it’s not good for authors, who is it good for? Again, that’s an easy answer: the publishers. And how do the publishers justify this? Experience? Marketing? Exposure?

Call me dubious. As self-publishing becomes more prevalent, traditional publishers are in serious trouble if they don’t adapt. They will be forced to cut prices and raise royalty rates at some point. But if they do, how will they be able to sustain their businesses?

I’m not sure they can. Reducing their own expenses would help. We’ve already seen some consolidation among the publishers (e.g. the Random House/Penguin merger, aka “Randy Penguin”), and there will certainly be more to come. But there’s only so much you can squeeze out of a lemon. At some point, the publishers will need to offer additional value that readers can’t get elsewhere if they hope to continue their current business practices.

What will that added value be? Well, I’d like to think they’ll do something innovative–something consumers will love–but I’m not holding my breath. For instance, what if they offered a digital copy free with every purchase of a paper book? That’s something that would interest me. It probably won’t ever happen, but we’ve already seen similar moves from record companies and comic book publishers (why aren’t we seeing more of this in the book world?). But that’s probably too consumer friendly for the big publishers. Besides, self-published authors could do the same thing if their books are available in print (all for a lower cost), so I’m not sure it would give traditional publishers much of an advantage.

More likely, traditional publishers will just keep signing big name authors to exclusive contracts to ensure they don’t self-publish. This will force readers to pay big publisher prices if they want the latest works from these big name authors. And that will postpone the inevitable… at least for a little while. Eventually, those same big name authors will realize that it’s their name that sells books, not their publisher, and they could be making even more money publishing their own work. When that happens, they’ll be leaving their publishers as well.

It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. In the meantime, I’ll just keep browsing the “bargain bin” for ebooks from this rising class of self-publishing stars like Hugh Howey, and I’ll keep an eye out for the yet-to-be-discovered up-and-comers. If you look hard enough, you’ll find their books are just as good as the traditionally published ones.

Readers of this blog know I mentioned Mr. Leonard frequently in my posts on writing. As a new author, I found his advice invaluable. I’m forever thankful he took the time to pen his “10 Rules For Writing,” even if I didn’t always follow them. He will be missed, not only as a writer, but as a mentor.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks creating a trailer for my book The Woodlander. I’ve never done animation before (as if you couldn’t tell), but I did all the work myself, including the music. It was a lot of fun, but I’ll be glad to get back to writing, and getting some sleep!

Let me know what you think!

*Update – let me know if you’re having trouble hearing the bass line. It sounds great on my stereo, but not so much on my iPad, so plug in your headphones!

*Update 2 -Because the bass line wasn’t coming across on devices with small speakers (like laptops and tablets), I uploaded another version with different introductory music, so you should at least hear something now. Still, I’m sad to lose that cool bass line intro. It reminded me of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Already compromising my art… *sigh*